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Jen Beagin

Biography

Jen Beagin

Jen Beagin holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine, and is a recipient of a Whiting Award in fiction. Her first novel, PRETEND I'M DEAD, was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and VACUUM IN THE DARK was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction. She is also the author of BIG SWISS. She lives in Hudson, New York.

Jen Beagin

Books by Jen Beagin

Big Swiss
by Jen Beagin - Fiction, Humor, Women's Fiction

Greta lives with her friend, Sabine, in an ancient Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, New York. The house is unrenovated, uninsulated and full of bees. Greta spends her days transcribing therapy sessions for a sex coach who calls himself Om. She becomes infatuated with his newest client, a repressed married woman she affectionately refers to as Big Swiss. One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’ voice in town, and they quickly become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware that Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship.

Vacuum in the Dark
by Jen Beagin - Fiction, Humor, Women's Fiction

Mona is 26 and cleans houses for a living in Taos, New Mexico. Her boyfriend, Dark, happens to be married to one of her clients. But Dark and his wife aren’t the only complicated clients on Mona’s roster. There’s also the Hungarian artist couple who --- with her addiction to painkillers and his lingering stares --- reminds Mona of troubling aspects of her childhood, and some of the underlying reasons her life had to be restarted in the first place. As she tries to get over the heartache of her affair and the older pains of her youth, Mona winds up on an eccentric, moving journey of self-discovery that takes her back to her beginnings where she attempts to unlock the key to having a sense of home in the future.

Pretend I'm Dead
by Jen Beagin - Fiction, Humor, Women's Fiction

Mona is almost 24, emotionally adrift and cleaning houses to get by. Handing out clean needles to drug addicts, she falls for a recipient she calls Mr. Disgusting, who proceeds to break her heart in unimaginable ways. Seeking a kind of healing, Mona decamps to Taos, New Mexico, where she finds a community of seekers and cast-offs, all of whom have one or two things to teach her --- the pajama-wearing, blissed-out New Agers, the slightly creepy client with peculiar tastes in controlled substances, the psychic who might really be psychic. But always lurking just beneath the surface are her memories of growing up in a chaotic, destructive family from which she’s trying to disentangle herself, and the larger legacy of the past she left behind.